12th of Never Read Free Page A

and spoke well and persuasively on camera. He passed as a reasonable facsimile of a person. A little digging into his past had turned up five divorces and the ownership of a Glock semiautomatic, which he carried at all times.
    Yuki had been with these ghouls through countless hours of depositions and felt that she knew them too well.
    She had dressed this morning in a bright red suit because she had a slight build, could look younger than her years, and because of the fact that red made her look and feel more powerful.
    You couldn’t hang back in red. You couldn’t hesitate. You really had to live up to red.
    She also wore a gold star on a chain around her neck, a graduation-from-law-school gift from her mother, who had been murdered several years earlier.
    Wearing the star kept Keiko Castellano present in Yuki’s mind and might even help her to win.
    She had to win.
    This was a tremendous opportunity to get justice for the victims, to become a hero to female victims everywhere. It was also an opportunity to be humiliated by a savage attorney and his perverted, murdering client.
    It was her job to make sure that Keith Herman didn’t get out of jail—ever.
    The buzz in the gallery intensified, then cut off suddenly as the door leading from the judge’s chambers opened behind the bench and Judge Arthur R. Nussbaum entered the courtroom.

Chapter 3
    YUKI HALF LISTENED as Judge Nussbaum instructed the handpicked jury of six men, six women, and four alternates, who were as diverse a group as could be imagined: black, white, brown, white-collar, and blue-collar.
    Nussbaum had been a clever trial lawyer, but the judge was new at his job and Yuki was sure he would play this one by the book.
    When he asked her if she was ready to begin, she said she was. Gaines whispered, “Go get ’em,” and Yuki stood, greeted the jury, and walked confidently to the lectern in the well of the courtroom. Then, without warning, she blanked. She couldn’t remember the first sentence in her opener, the key that would unlock her carefully wrought statement.
    Yuki looked over at Gaines. He smiled, nodded, and her mind unfroze.
    She said, “The defendant, Keith Herman, is a killer, and the evidence in this case will show you that the people who depended on Mr. Herman, the ones who looked to him for protection and love, are the people who should have feared him the most.”
    Yuki paused to let her words sink in, looked at every member of the jury, and began to lay out her case.
    “On March first, a day like any other, Keith Herman tucked his daughter’s lifeless body into the backseat of his Lexus, and she was never seen again. Jennifer Herman, Keith Herman’s wife, never reported her daughter missing, because as her husband was driving off with their daughter, Jennifer Herman was already dead by her husband’s hand.
    “You will hear testimony that before she disappeared, Jennifer Herman told a friend on several occasions that she was afraid of her husband and that if anything ever happened to her, the friend should go to the police. Which this friend did. Had Lesley Rohan not called the police, they wouldn’t have looked for Jennifer Herman and her body would have been buried under several tons of garbage in a landfill.
    “You will hear testimony from another witness, an under-cover police officer, who will tell you that he was offered one hundred thousand dollars by the defendant to kill Jennifer Herman.”
    Yuki’s mind unclenched. She knew that she had gotten into the rhythm and the beat of her perfectly choreographed and well-rehearsed presentation. She was in a great groove.
    She told the jury about the witnesses she would introduce—the sanitation worker who found the body of Jennifer Herman in eight separate garbage bags and the forensic pathologist who would talk about Jennifer Herman’s cause of death.
    She walked to the counsel table and picked up an 8 × 10-inch color photo of a young child with dark wavy hair and a